One of the most effective ways to connect with your audience is to establish your brand identity through your blog. This will help convey the purpose of the blog and the value it wishes to deliver to its audience. It gives a reason to your readers to revisit your blog. Your blog must have a strong personality to attract and retain the readers or visitors. One of the best ways to retain visitors is to highlight the writers or authors on your blog. It is very important to reiterate the profiles of the people, publishing content, on your blog.
Creating Wordpress author profiles will give a clear idea to your visitors about the people who are generating content for your blog. It clarifies the purpose of your blog. No matter what your blog aims at, introducing the readers to the writers can improve connections and relationships with the reader group. This is how more visitors get attracted to the blog.
In this blog post, I present some of the plugins which can help you promote your blog authors and can help your visitors easily find the content they are looking for. You will also get information about some tools for creating an author’s page which lists all the contributors to your site in a single place.
Let’s first understand the importance of creating an impressive author profile.
Why is Author Profile Important? What Purpose does It Serve?
An informative profile, alongside the author’s post, gives a good opportunity to highlight the people who have contributed the content. This will make your blog look unique. It will also give a chance to you to display the credentials of your authors. Providing links to the author’s social media profiles also helps in establishing your blog identity and what it truly wishes to deliver. You must ensure that all outstanding blog posts or articles get recognized, read, and appreciated by the target audience or visitors.
Writing a Great Author Bio
One of the best ways to deliver a good author bio is to give a by-line to the author at the end of the post. With some WordPress configurations, you can include a longer author bio which can be featured on a different author profile page. This implies that you can avail of two different formats when it comes to author bio. First is inserting in-post author profile and the other is the author page profile.
Creating an Impressive In-Post Author Profile
The in-post author profile is usually displayed at the end of the blog post. It must be succinct but you must ensure that it is noticeable.
Following are the Features an Effective in-post Author Profile must Possess:
- It must be relevant
- It must focus on career milestones of the author
- It must not boast too much about your capabilities
- Show links to display your past work
Let’s look at each of them in-depth
- Relevancy: The author’s interests listed in the profile must be relevant to the topic of the blog post. You can present all the topic related profile information to let the reader understand the depth of the author’s knowledge. For instance, if you are contributing to a tech blog, then you may want to display a gist of your coding knowledge. This will help enhance the credibility and authenticity of the blog post.
- Showcase your Achievements: In your author bio, you must state your educational qualifications and also important accomplishments in your post-academic career. Any relevant experience can also be mentioned, even if it is not related to the blog on which you are posting your work. If you currently hold a position in the related field, then you must surely mention about it in the author profile.
- Don’t go Over the Board While Mentioning About You: Whilst specifying about a related product or service is okay, it may not be preferable to use your author bio section to advertise or market certain products or services. Instead, your bio should just inform the readers how they can find out more about you or contact you. If your blog post displays your knowledge on a specific topic, then you can just leave a link to your detailed profile which has your contact information.
- Social Media and External Links: An effective author bio also provides a link to your social media profiles. This increases your following and demonstrates your credibility. The linked social media profiles must be in sync with the blog you are writing of. Depending on the topic of the blog, you can either link your Facebook profile or LinkedIn profile.
Author Profile Summary – In-Post
The Author profile must always be succinct and state important information only if it has to be impressive. Don’t worry about not being able to state much about you as you can simply paste a link which opens up your detailed author profile. The tone of your author bio must be knowledgeable and professional. It must not, in any way, convey that you are trying to boast about your capabilities.
Profile Page WordPress Plugins
With the use of author box plugins you can display an author bio box alongside each post. These plugins help in enhancing author profile options. Some plugins also help you list all your blog contributors on a single page, manage author profile photos, give credit to multiple authors on a single post, and manage guest bloggers without any requirement to create a novel WordPress user account.
The following plugins can help you enhance the capability of your blog in handling author profiles and crediting authors for their work.
WP Author Box Lite: A WordPress theme should display an author box at the end of your post. If it doesn’t, then the solution is to go for a free plugin called WP author Box Lite.
It not only features a clean looking design, but it also offers a latest post tab. With this reader can go through more content from their favorite author.
WP Author Box Lite plugin also offers additional features such as automatic Google+, Color customizations, and FaceBook authorship. You can also post links to your social media profiles with the help of this plugin. The plugin settings offer flexibility when it comes to displaying author box on posts, or pages. It also allows you to choose the location where you wish to post the author profile around the blog post.
Starbox – the Author Box for Humans: This is also a free plugin which can add attractive author boxes to your website. It comes packed with great features, which allow your users to enter links to their social media profiles, and submit their job title along with company name and URL. With this plugin, the default user profile page of WordPress gets upgraded so that it will have some additional fields. With this plugin you can choose whether to display the box before, after, or before and after the blog post.
In this way there are a number of plugins which can help include an impressive author profile for posts on your blog. The key is to identify the requirements and interests of your target audience and serve them accordingly.
Images: “text of WRITER on cubes/Shutterstock.com“
________________________________________________________________________________
Tweak Your Biz is a thought leader global publication and online business community. Today, it is part of the Small Biz Trends stable of websites and receives over 300,000 unique views per month. Would you like to write for us?
An outstanding title can increase tweets, Facebook Likes, and visitor traffic by 50% or more. Generate great titles for your articles and blog posts with the Tweak Your Biz Title Generator.
